Virtual Reality and Hypermedia in Future Telecommunication Products and Services (VIRGIN)

Professor Petri Pulli and Professor Harri Oinas-Kukkonen
Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu
petri.pullioulu.fi, harri.oinas-kukkonenoulu.fi
http://www.infotech.oulu.fi/virgin

Background and Mission

The research group consists of researchers from the Departments of Information Processing Science, Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering Laboratory), Economics and Business Administration, Process Engineering, and VTT Electronics.

Our research agenda addresses particular enabling technologies, Virtual Reality and Hypermedia Systems, in the context of the future telecommunication society, services and industries. We are determined to carry out research in utilising these technologies both as enabling technologies to help in the process of future product and service development, and as technologies to be embedded in future telecommunication products and services.

(1) Personal mobile virtual reality services. In the future, moving mass and people around will become more and more expensive for society due to a shortage of energy and overpopulation. Sustainable development can be gained by virtualisation of society and different services. We conduct research on personal virtual environments that can provide an essential set of virtual reality service capabilities. The main target for research is augmented reality services that utilise broadband digital telecommunication becoming available with 3rd and 4th generation digital media phones. A major challenge is new user-interface metaphors bringing together multimodality and efficient utilisation of the human sense bandwidth. A major challenge is precision tracking with the aid of computer vision and image and gesture recognition.

(2) Virtual Reality Prototyping in new telecommunication product development is the application of advanced modeling and simulation techniques, user interface techniques and virtual reality techniques to support product design. The aim of our research is to utilize a virtual reality based development environment for consumer electronics and telecommunication products in order to develop all-digital prototypes resembling the physical products as closely as possible in terms of visual 3-D image, haptic characteristics and auditory characteristics. The main target for our research is to support new product development for future generation (3rd and 4th generation) mobile digital media phones. Also a heavy emphasis is on geographically distributed, team-based new product development.

(3) Hypermedia application design: Complementary modelling methods for designing adaptive information systems is under development based on existing systems design methodologies and recognized new requirements for such methodologies. The methods will be experimented with adaptation towards an individual user (aka. personalization) and towards mobile use, use time and location (physical context). Also a new paradigm for developing secure information systems will be developed. Issues related to information systems design in the Internet context in emerging organizations will be studied, with focus on e.g. modelling, usability experiments and prototyping. Future research on conceptualizing so-called ubiquitous computing environments from a hypermedia functionality point of view will be prepared.

(4) Electronic commerce. New concepts for conducting electronic commerce through different Internet, web, and hypermedia technologies, virtual reality product models, and mobile media phones are studied, modeled, constructed and measured. An important aspect is measuring the user interaction, i.e. web flow experience. By measuring the web flow, better understanding can be gained on how to design better e-commerce services and which portfolio of products to present and how.

Scientific Progress

During 2001 the main scientific results were

• Tuppi3D - a future mobile game, based on rich interaction in a mobile networked virtual environment, has been demonstrated with a multimedia presentation.
• A feasibility study of micropayment systems for mobile content and e-commerce services has been carried out in Tekes/TLX/Monica project.
• A Visual Cell metaphor for mobile telepresence services has been developed and a rudimentary laboratory prototype constructed. The Visual Cell concept allows user intuitive and natural access control of presence services and personal location based data services. (Academy/Teletronics/Paula project).
• A set of design method fragments has been produced for developing advanced web and mobile hypermedia applications. A method for measuring user experience in web-based and wireless electronic commerce has been developed in Tekes/Usix/Vrflow2 and Owla projects.

The Tuppi3D rich interaction experiment design follows the traditional lumberjack theme with various environment and atmosphere effects that support and enrich the interaction and intensity of the experience within the virtual networked mobile game world (Tekes/TLX/Monica project).

Exploitation of Results

Virtual prototyping technology transfer to a tool provider company (Cybelius Software) has been completed and led to production of a commercial toolset called Cybelius Maestro.

Virtual prototyping technology knowhow has been applied to aerospace distributed design meeting support for the Airbus Consortium (EU/IST/AIT-VEPOP project).

Marisil sign language and a Visual Cell metaphor have been incorporated into international research agenda via the EU Wireless Strategic Initiative (WSI Project) and World Wireless Research Forum (WWRF).

Cybelius MaestroTM is an integrated development environment for virtual product design of electronics and telecommunication products.

Future Goals

For the year 2002, in addition to ongoing research, the new scientific goals are:

• A study of rich call based virtual mobile interactive services. Experimentation with future mobile games based on rich interaction in a mobile networked virtual environment will continue (Eureka/ITEA/Moose).
• A lifecycle model will be developed for visual scenario-based service development for mobile and ubiquitous services. There will be a contribution to the development of international research framework and roadmap for World Wireless Research Forum (WWRF) (EU/IST/WSI project).

Personnel

External Funding